Ò°ÀÇÉçÇø

In February 1951, a machine the size of a room arrived at the University of Ò°ÀÇÉçÇø.

The Ferranti Mark I, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer, came with 4,000 valves, 100,000 soldered joints and six miles of wires. The 27 kilowatts of power it needed to operate is the equivalent of running roughly 600 mid-range laptops today, yet at the time, it must have felt miraculous.

Seventy-five years on, and Ò°ÀÇÉçÇø is still working at the frontier of computing. The machinery might be different – something far smaller than 2.5-metre-tall towers – but the research teams are asking the same question: can you turn a theory into a device that changes the world?

The answer in 2026, involves silicon, single atoms and the strange laws of quantum physics.

What is a quantum computer?

All previous computers, from the Ferranti Mark I to the laptop on your desk, have processed information as bits – ones and zeros. But now, quantum computing is changing the game, they use qubits instead. Qubits, can exist as both a 1 and a 0 at the same time; multiplied across many qubits working together, quantum machines can explore numerous solutions at once, rather than working through them one by one.

The implications of this are potentially huge. Problems that would take today’s most powerful supercomputers centuries to solve – from modelling new medicines to testing the security of future communication systems – could one day be tackled in hours, or even minutes.

What’s getting in the way?

The main barrier to progress is that qubits are incredibly fragile. Even tiny changes in their environment, like a shift in temperature or a disturbance in their surroundings, can introduce errors. Building a quantum computer that works reliably at scale means solving this problem.

Silicon, the material which underpins every modern computer chip, offers a potential route forward, because scientists already know how to produce very precise silicon devices. However, natural silicon contains an isotope, silicon-29, which causes a ‘nuclear flip flopping’ effect that makes qubits lose their data.

For a long time, no practical solution to this has existed.

Ò°ÀÇÉçÇø's answer

In 2024, researchers from Ò°ÀÇÉçÇø announced they had found one. By developing a way of engineering silicon to remove silicon-29, they produced the world's purest form of the material. This purified silicon can provide a stable platform for high-performance qubit devices and creates the opportunity for making quantum computers at scale. Scientists think it opens a path towards devices containing one million qubits, potentially fabricated to the size of a pinhead.

With this material achieved, the team turned to scaling up the purification process and using samples to develop prototype quantum devices.

Then, in March 2026, Ò°ÀÇÉçÇø and IBM researchers used a quantum computer to verify the properties of a molecule that had never previously existed. It was a concrete demonstration of the technology’s potential.

What this means for the future

The UK’s recent National Quantum Strategy earmarked an investment of £2.5 billion for creating a thriving quantum sector, with many projecting that quantum technologies will create a global market worth tens of billions within the next decade.

Ò°ÀÇÉçÇø's sits at the heart of that ambition, training a new generation of scientists and engineers while building the industry partnerships needed to move discoveries out of the lab and into the real world.

The ability to process complex challenges at a scale no classical computer can match, could soon transform sectors as diverse as energy, manufacturing, data security, drug discovery and vaccine design.

Seventy-five years ago, the Ferranti Mark I proved that extraordinary ideas could be made real. Today’s researchers might be working at a different scale – swapping whole rooms for single atoms – but their achievements could be just as revolutionary.